Marina Bondi

Academic discourse across disciplines

This volume reflects the emerging interest in cross-disciplinary variation in both spoken and written academic English, exploring the conventions and modes of persuasion characteristic of different disciplines and which help define academic inquiry. This collection brings together chapters by applied linguists and EAP practitioners from seven different countries. The authors draw on various specialised spoken and written corpora to illustrate the notion of variation and to explore the concept of discipline and the different methodologies they use to investigate these corpora. The book also seeks to make explicit the valuable links that can be made between research into academic speech and writing as text, as process, and as social practice.

Dialogue within discourse communities : metadiscursive perspectives on academic genres

The book explores aspects of reflexivity and interactivity in a variety of academic genres: oral and written, scientific and educational. Academic discourse is explored from a variety of perspectives that take a dialogic view of language use as their starting point, ranging from conversation analysis to descriptive or applied genre studies. Particular attention is paid to the way metadiscursive expressions contribute to a representation of the communicative procedures that characterise the ongoing (scientific and educational) dialogues.

Voice in Textbooks: between Exposition and Argument

The notion of voice has been discussed from different perspectives in academic discourse studies, often in relation to discursive identity and self-representation. A major concern has been the formation of student writer identity, with the literature on composition often highlighting the need to show individuality and personal expressiveness in discourse (Bowden, 1995). Literacy studies have also pointed to writers’ need to demonstrate awareness of the discourse practices of their community and to take a stance towards other social codes and voices (Ivanic, 1998), insisting that all writing reinterprets collective voice types in ways that locate users culturally and historically (Ivanic and Camps, 2001). Teachers are asked to draw attention to issues of discursive identity, to the resources we use to project other voices, and to the continuous process of becoming in discourse (Prior, 2001). Educational debate has often centred on different cultural traditions in writing, showing great interest in the potential disadvantage of L2 writers (Ramanathan and Atkinson, 1999) whose individual voice may differ from the experience and expertise of writers from other cultures (Le Ha, 2009). Many have warned against a tendency to associate voice with individualism and to overlook the voices of L2 writers (Matsuda, 2001; Hirvela and Belcher, 2001), in line with critical approaches to the multiplicity of voices manifested by each writer.

and now I’m finally of the mind to say i hope the whole ship goes down...: Markers of subjectivity and evaluative phraseology in blogs

The paper is part of a research project on evaluative meanings in Italian and English web-logs. Web-logs may be regarded as increasingly popular, virtual arenas where information (including news) is produced, shared and – crucially – commented on evaluatively. Our focus here is on how bloggers evaluate the news in English and in Italian. Looking at business, politics and sport news on dedicated web-logs, we investigate the phraseology most frequently employed in comments on a piece of news. The data for our study are taken from the Business, Politics and Sport sections of a blog corpus that collects texts dating from September 2008 to September 2009: in all 3,042,023 running words. Our methodology is adapted from Gledhill’s (2000) study on Salient Grammatical Words (SGW). We start with an overview of the keyword lists extracted from the blog corpus, looking at potential markers of the nature and structure of news blogs. We then focus on markers of subjectivity, draw their collocational profile, identify evaluative uses in context, and, following Hunston (2008) and Groom (2010), explore the semantic sequences they are characterized by. Markers of subjectivity are found to be involved in similar semantic sequences in the two languages, though characterized by different syntactic patterns and collocational profiles. The analysis confirms the importance of evaluation in blogs, as well as the key role of semantic sequences in a contrastive analysis of patterns.

What came to be called: evaluative what and authorial voice in the discourse of history

Abstract While acknowledging the importance of specific lexis in profiling discourse communities, studies on academic discourse have paid growing attention to general lexis and its disciplinary specificity. This is particularly true of recent approaches to phraseology in English for Academic Purposes (EAP), including both statistically significant clusters and grammar patterns and semantic sequences. The current paper explores the notion of semantic sequences through a case study of sequences involving relative what. Based on a corpus of academic journal articles in the field of history (2.5 million words), the analysis highlights co-occurrence of what with a range of signals referring to a shift in time perspectives or attribution, and points to the “re-defining” function of what, introducing a re-formulation of what has just been said or proposing an interpretation on the basis of the cotext. A tentative classification of the sequences is provided, building on previous studies on a local grammar of evaluation. The sequences are shown to highlight the argumentative voice of historians interacting with their sources and their discourse community, by showing awareness of different interpretations of people and events in history.

Textual Voices in Corporate Reporting: A Cross-Cultural Analysis of Chinese, Italian, and American CSR Reports

This article investigates direct quotations in a corpus of corporate social responsibility (CSR) reports in Italian, Chinese, and English. The corpus is composed of 60 CSR reports published by Italian, Chinese, and American companies in the banking and energy sector. The study aims at exploring what types of textual voices are involved in the discourse of CSR reporting and how different sources of voices are represented, using the framework of social actor representation proposed by Van Leeuwen. The results show that the voices presented in direct quotations are often “orchestrated” by companies into “symphony” rather than “polyphony.” Most of the sources of direct quotations are represented as individuals with specified names. The comparative analysis shows that companies from different cultural backgrounds present different preferences in selecting and representing the various sources. The Italian and American CSR reports present more voices from managers, while the Chinese CSR reports show a clearer preference for voices from employees and clients.

The Generic Structure of CSR Reports in Italian, Chinese, and English: A Corpus-Based Analysis

<bold>Background:</bold> <italic>This study examines the generic structure of corporate social responsibility (CSR) reports, which are becoming standard practice for corporate communication of social and environmental performance beyond financial disclosure.</italic> <bold>Literature review:</bold> <italic>Genre theories provide a framework for exploring genres contextualized in different cultures. Based on the English for Specific Purposes approach of genre analysis, this study compares the move structure of CSR reports in Italian, Chinese, and English from a corpus-based perspective</italic>. <bold>Research questions:</bold> <italic>1. What are the main moves used in CSR reports? 2. Are there any cross-cultural similarities or variations in terms of generic features?</italic> <bold> Methodology:</bold> <italic>Combining genre theories with concepts from Systemic Functional Linguistics, we designed an observational framework for move identification. Based on a 15-move scheme, we annotated 18 CSR reports for comparative analysis.</italic> <bold>Results and conclusions:</bold> <italic>The CSR report is characterized by rhetorical recursivity and hybridity of speech acts: beyond “reporting” and “presenting,” it is also “demonstrating,” “evaluating,” and “committing.” As a globally established genre, it presents noticeable generic similarity in different languages, suggesting that the communicative purposes of CSR reports are recognized by different cultures. The top six moves in the Performance-reporting section of the CSR reports present identical trends in terms of extensiveness ranking in all three languages. Cross-cultural variations mainly involve the use of optional moves, such as the dominant use of the move “Presenting individual cases” in the Chinese sample. The observational framework for move identification may also be transferable to other genres. The limitations of this study include the sample size and the absence of an author survey. Future research could investigate the CSR report from a diachronic perspective, to explore how its genre structure has developed over time.</italic>

Probably most important of all. Importance markers in academic and popular history articles

Evaluations of importance are central to the nature of academic discourse, with its need to establish and share disciplinary knowledge. This study shows how importance markers help guide the reader in recognising coherence relations, while reflecting the value system of the community. Using corpora of journal and popular articles in history, the analysis examines nouns and adjectives of importance, adverbials and framing statements. By constituting identification and cohesive structures that thematise evaluation and increase writer visibility, importance markers contribute greatly to knowledge construction in research articles, while in knowledge dissemination they are less frequent and oriented towards generalising.

A Review of “Historical discourse: the language of time, cause and evaluation”

Discourse Analysis. These socially oriented approaches to language studies are only briefly acknowledged in the book. A further concern about the book is the limited discussion of existing research studies that utilise the social realist approach to applied linguistics advocated by the authors. A reference is made only to one study (Belz, 2002), but instead of discussing it in detail, the authors describe other applied linguistic studies which have elements in common with their approach, and then proceed to cite sociological studies using methods which may be transferable to applied linguistics. As a result, the readers are not given any extended illustration of how, in practice, research within the social realist framework would look and what outcomes could be expected. Nonetheless, the authors should be congratulated on presenting an important discussion of what Derek Layder refers to in the foreword as the ‘protean questions of epistemology and ontology’ (p. xi). The book provides many interesting areas of debate from which linguistics can benefit, such as looking for complex rather than simplified solutions to the agency-structure problem. As far as the discipline of sociology is concerned, the crucial contribution of this volume is its focus on the centrality of language in sociological research which could help to move the study of language away from the periphery of sociological enquiries. Overall, the book is an example of a critical and profound analysis of the interface between applied linguistics and social theory and one which is bound to inspire further reflection and discussion.